Anton Caputo: More on Corpus Birth Defects

I hope you noticed the article in Thursday’s paper on the state’s new study of birth defects in the Corpus Christi area.

The study, using six years of data from the Texas Birth Defects Registry, found Nueces County to have a rate of severe birth defects 17 percent higher than the state average and a rate of total birth defects 84 percent higher than the state.

State epidemiologist Peter Langlois is conducting a second study to see if there is any link between the defects and the refineries, landfills and other potential environmental hazards in the Corpus area.

What was missing in the daily story (and, trust me, it wasn’t for lack of trying) was input from other experts to help put the statistics in context.

Is a 17 percent increase significant? And what about the 84 percent increase, which is sort of being explained away by Corpus area doctors being more adept at diagnosing minor birth defects than doctors around the state?

Dr. Gary Shaw, research director at the California Birth Defects Monitoring Program, tried to but the 17 percent in context by pointing out that smoking increases the risk of lung disease by 1,100 percent. But he doesn’t discount the potential relevance of the increase, particularly if the second phase of the study, to be out in a year or so, shows a link between the defects and pollution or contamination.

“If we’re talking about an exposure that increases risk by 17 percent and that exposure was quite frequent, that would be something that could be a concern,” he said.

Dr. Kathleen K. Sulik, a birth defects expert and professor of cell and developmental biology at the University of North Carolina’s School of Medicine, was a little less cautious in her analysis.

“I’d worry about it,” she said. “When you’re talking about severe birth defects, what that usually means is severe structural abnormalities.”

What about the 84 percent increase in overall defects being attributed to local diagnostic practices?

“I can buy that,” Sulik said. “With some people, if your little finger is leaning in a little more than it should, one doctor who is very aware of that as a possible morphological defect would count that as one (a defect) and another wouldn’t. But 84 percent seems rather remarkable. It’s probably somewhere in the middle. As most things are.”